>
> Actually I think Foucault, unleke Derrida or
> Baudrillard, is a prettuy plain, straughforward
> writer, not pretty, but not overaly jargonistic,
> unlike most pomos or analytical philosophers, me
> included. What exactly of Foucault's ideas did you
> want to know somjething about? He wrote a lot about a
> lot of topics? Was there something in particular that
> puzzled you, or did you want the whole thing inm a
> paragraph? jks
I'll support this. I tried to read Derrida, and thought it was word salad. Maybe, if I spent a few years reading him very, very carefully, I might get some interesting insight... but I couldn't imagine any insight being worth that degree of work. And I have bills to pay and projects to finish.
As for Baudrillard, I read him about fifteen years ago at the insistence of some acquaintances. And I ws utterly shocked that these people would think that this derivative, empty _drivel_ could be considered profound. I had the feeling that his conception of America was an amalgam of 1950's era advertisement styles, at best-- it was like reading those dopey architectural manifestoes that pushed the reps of Le Corbusier and Mies Van der Rohe. As for his notions of simulacra, Philip K. Dick did it better decades before, and it's all just a riff on Plato's shadows on the walls of a cave. I finally realized that, while I'd been through this what-if-it's- all-an-illusion stuff when I was thirteen, and reading science fiction like a maniac, these acquaintances hadn't run into it until they read Baudrillard. So they thought he was utterly brilliant. Baudrillard's profundity is inversely proportional to the experience of the reader.